Jul 14, 08:30
Yet another fake Prospect
A few months ago I posted about a number of Fake Prospect incidents where it was just new market entrants trying to Shop us at dots and lines. Shopping other businesses, well, that’s fine, but really, wasting their time is not. This time the fake prospect took the drill to another level.
The US and the UK
Man how much I hate hearing someone being proud for having served US or UK companies. It’s like a magic word for some people for them to think they’ll get the backstage pass. I would really like it if it was like well, “we helped firms in Seattle or Manchester. Okay not forgetting how the “The US” and the “The UK” are usually accompanied with eye brows up with a cool-wannabe look. Jus’ wanned to say this one more time.
Suckups
“We’ve heard so much about your Mobile Web service and heard good stuff about it, you guys rock”
And I started thinkin’ at that time, we have NDAs with the people we deploy Mobile solutions and for the agencies that we do Mobile Web consultancy, we actually work under their umbrella and private branding. Apart from that, our Mobile Web service has been given as a complementary solution to new websites that we’ve built so far. So where is all this coming from? Well, just a suckup effort.
While opening his briefcase, I noticed a folder with Mobile Web title on the cover, seemed like a research folder to me.
So he offers and talks about synergy and partnership, and straight away he’s like:
“How do you do it, I mean how do you manage the workflow? I mean we might be working together, can you tell me how you start a project and how you finish it, and could you please briefly tell me about how you charge and how much you charge?”
You know, you really know it when you can work with someone or not from the first five minutes of talk, and he/his business wasn’t our style. Now add the fact that you can actually catch the Fake Prospect in the first five minutes.
He gets fed up of me going round and round about it, so he decided to just ask his magic question: How profitable is it? How much resources does it take to get a Mobile Web department on in a company?
Some people give wrong answers in such situations, I just preferred not answering at all. Actually I did answer this one with “I’m still outlining a book I’m writing about it, when it’s done I’ll send you a copy, that’s if it was published, but wait, I don’t think I could actually include a market study in it, just technical stuff”. That’s the time he got fedup of me giving answers to unasked questions, I enjoyed that moment. The look on his face said “What a moron snob”.
It’s so easy to gather such information, if the person you meet is honest and doesn’t pretend to be a friend while shopping you. If he was honest and actually telling the truth, chances were that we’d like to really have people to work with and give some of our work to, for us to lift some overhead. It ain’t about not sharing, it’s about the way of approaching and making a business relation.
What usually happens is the fact that we at dots and lines are all young people so in most cases we’d be the youngest guys in the room, and that deceives the approachers who wanna easily shop us.
Related Articles
« Previous post: Understanding the Context, Common Sense
» Next post: A short silence until mid-august